Project: PlanetMath Outlines Series

We already have some “topic articles” which could be a good start, but long term it would be useful to add a lot of content. We can take the Schuam’s Outline series as a model. Replicating this material and giving it away for free would take a lot of work.

Assuming all the books are of roughly the same size, we would want to have something like 6000 expository chapters, 60000 problems, and 20000 solutions. Presumably we have a good start on the expository texts with the current PlanetMath encyclopedia, but in order to finish the outline in a reasonable timeframe, we’ll need at least 10000 new problems per year. That sounds like a lot of work, but luckily we have an “ace in the hole”: the PlanetMath Books project. In short: if we find, scan, and OCR all of the public domain mathematics books in existence, we will have tons and tons of text to work with. Some further details are described in this \hrefhttps://github.com/holtzermann17/planetmath-docs/issues/37issue in our organizational issue tracker.

If we get a big influx of new content, we’re going to have to figure out how to upload it without disturbing users. At the same time, we will presumably want to use the existing encyclopedia as the “framework” within which to organize everything.

Accordingly, here is a list of outlines (copied-and-modified from the Schuam’s website) that we might eventually want to provide. As time goes by I will try to link them to new “collections” that walk people through the relevant content on PlanetMath. Note that this doesn’t represent all of the outlines ever published in the Schuam’s series – and we might not get to all of these. We might also come up with our own outlines! Accordingly, I’m making this article world editable. Please feel free to add to the list, link to new collections, and discuss other ways to build PlanetMath’s resources!